Speak The Web – Manchester
February 22nd, 2010
There’s been plenty of reviews of the Manchester leg of Speak The Web over the last week and I thought I’d say a few words about what I got out of the night.
All four speakers gave quality, relevant talks and I managed to take something away from all of them.
Ben Childs heightened my awareness of the necessity of properly optimising sites for mobile browsers (rather than accepting that users must constantly zoom and pan for content). He also made it clear that a tiered approach to mobile content delivery is the best way to enable usability across a multitude of devices, and that the iPhone is not ‘the standard’ mobile experience. I’m planning on getting either a WordPress mobile plugin for my site or sorting it out manually soon.
Dom Hodgson’s talk was quick fire and I got a few hints and tips I’ve not come across regarding SEO. Interesting social media examples thrown in there as well.
Remy Sharp hit us with a code heavy talk and to be honest I’m still a little confused as to exactly what everything he talked about actually was. I think I understood that HTML5 (with all its new elements) makes many more properties accessible to JavaScript thus making it easier to apply code to and allowing more powerful things to be carried out. Clearly an area I need to read up on. Comment at will! Slides here: http://www.slideshare.net/remy.sharp/html5-js-apis
Andy Clarke’s talk was by far the easiest to follow. He’s a professional speaker and had his talk well structured to define, explain and allow you to take it in. He spoke about designing for the best, most modern browsers first and allowing the older browsers to receive functional but less advanced designs. He called this technique Hardboiled. I already thought that there wasn’t anything wrong with going for it and utilising loads of modern CSS3 whilst allowing the older browsers to render things slightly differently, but he showed some nice examples of how to do that and why it’s important – to get new CSS properties accepted as standards and to push web design forward. I also remember him covering what was maybe a JavaScript technique that allows you to apply completely different CSS to the same elements but I can’t remember exactly what he said so if anyone reads this and knows what I think I’m referring to, please pop it in a comment. I can’t reference his slides as they aren’t available until November dues to him speaking at An Event Apart.
There was also some debate about him calling his technique Hardboiled. People were saying it’s just graceful degradation which I suppose it is, but he came at it in terms of ignoring people who want sites to look exactly the same in every browser (as we’ve all heard before) and just going for it with modern and sometimes experimental techniques. Some people in the bar expressed feelings that it’s not realistic to design different solutions for the same pages etc and I can see where they’re coming from with regard to time and money. Maybe deploying some of his techniques and slowly building up the amount you use is the way to go about it…I don’t know yet?!
It was certainly a successful and worthwhile evening, both in terms of networking and coming away with new information and ideas.
Thanks to Dan Donald and Rich Clark for organising it all.
Tags: SpeakTheWeb
February 23rd, 2010 at 9:16 am
Alright mate,
The JS stuff he mentioned was:
http://www.modernizr.com/
and
IE css3 – http://forabeautifulweb.com/blog/about/enable_css_pseudo-element_selectors_in_internet_explorer_with_ie-css3.js/
Cheers
February 23rd, 2010 at 3:22 pm
Cheers Gaz, couldn’t remember that stuff.
March 9th, 2010 at 5:27 pm
[...] what <canvas> can be used for and the <video> and <audio> elements. Also, in my recent post about Speak The Web, I mentioned that after Remy Sharp’s talk I was left needing to understand the HTML5 [...]